AI News

Starcloud Demand for the computing power that undergirds AI models — “compute,” in the lingo of the industry — has skyrocketed. Tech giants are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to construct massively resource-intensive data centers across the country, but the aging power grid and an increasingly resistant public are quickly turning these expansion efforts into nightmare. As an alternative, many AI companies — including Elon Musk’s SpaceX — are vo

Shutterstock / Futurism Out of all the big AI players, Anthropic is the one that likes to doomsay about AI the most — because it’s also the most concerned about AI safety, of course. So you’ll never guess what kind of wacky stuff that its newly hired economist, Chad Jones, believes. As the Financial Times recently highlighted, Jones — a longtime Stanford economics professor — once wrote a paper that weighed up what would be an acceptable risk level of huma

Shutterstock / Futurism Award winning economist and Brown University professor Roberto Serrano says he has detected what appears to be the largest AI cheating scandal in Ivy League history. As Spanish newspaper El País reports, Serrano noticed red flags as soon as he looked at the scores of a March midterm exam for one of the classes he teaches, an advanced undergrad course in mathematical economics. The take-home and closed-book exam — an “Honor Code” typ

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock US and Chinese AI researchers are calling for global cooperation on the tech, fearing that its unchecked development could lead to an unimaginable catastrophe. “AI is a global technology with global benefits, global harms, and a consistent tendency for new capabilities to eventually proliferate,” Stephen Casper, a computer scientist at MIT who spoke at a major AI conference in Beijing thi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock An enormous amount of resources and money go into the construction of a data center. The enormous facilities are filled to the brim with extremely sought-after gear, from hard-to-get-by AI chips to cooling equipment. And for thieves eyeing these construction projects, there’s another worthwhile target as well: oodles of copper, a metal that has risen considerably in price over the last fe

I’m struggling, here, trying to figure out how I want to start this. Because I like the parallelism of beginning my first VisionQuest recap with Vision’s opening monologue from episode one and then starting my final VisionQuest recap with Vision’s closing monologue from episode eight. But that’s a writer’s detail, the kind of self-indulgent stylistic flourish that makes me happy but doesn’t necessarily serve you, the reader. The more truthful, and relevant

There’s nothing funny about the death of Ashley Flynn, a 37-year-old Ohio teacher and mother of two children gunned down earlier this year. Her family told Fox News in a statement back in February, “our hearts are shattered.” It’s 2026, however, and as is so often the case with tragedies lately, events are too absurd to maintain the seriousness needed to digest them properly. One might even say “Circumstances spoke louder than hearts ever could.” The atten

I have nothing against the honorable profession of writing blog posts on Sunday morning about the previous night’s episode of Saturday Night Live. I’ve edited many such blog posts in my time, while generally thinking, deep down, that watching SNL is mostly not worth it. However, if you’re someone who follows the saga of AI, SNL’s segment from last night about Dario Amodei’s starring Jane Wickline as Amodei is worth watching. I would go as far as to say the

In town halls and city council meetings across the nation, hatred of data centers continues to be one of the few issues where Americans of all stripes can find common ground. Even previously data center-friendly politicians have had to pull hasty reversals on the topic as the midterm elections creep closer, and it’s become harder and harder to deny that constituents detest the things. Of course, there is no such thing as a universally held position. Wherev

AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are expected to play a much bigger role in holiday shopping this year. Traffic to U.S. retail sites coming from AI platforms is expected to rise 130% year over year this holiday season, according to Adobe’s annual online shopping forecast. The forecast covers online spending from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31 and is based on Adobe Analytics data from more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites. Overall, Adobe projects U.S.

The U.S. government will ramp up its use of AI tools to automate redactions in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. FOIA requests allow members of the public to obtain records directly from the federal government. They are frequently used by lawmakers, activists, and journalists seeking to scrutinize government agencies and hold them accountable. Agencies are generally required to disclose reques

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has asked a court in his state to order OpenAI to pause development of new AI models without proper guardrails, given the “existential risks their product poses to human civilization—Floridians included.” The legal filing, submitted Monday, is part of a lawsuit brought in June alleging that ChatGPT is harmful to children and has been used in cases of self-harm and school shootings. The opening lines of the filing are

Meta is on a mission “to bring personal superintelligence to everyone,” as CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it last year. We got our first glimpse of what that vision looks like earlier this month: a deceptively cutesy, Tamagotchi-like personal AI agent called Muse. On Monday, the company announced it’s also bringing its superintelligence ambitions to the all-important enterprise market with the launch of a new internal business unit. The Meta Enterprise Platform,

A major developer is offering $10,000 to every family in a small Pennsylvania town if they don’t object to the construction of a mega data center project. Nevertheless, local advocates are standing their ground, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. NorthPoint Development wants to build a major data center complex on 1,300 acres of land in Hazle Township near Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. Faced with growing local opposition, the developer fo

OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Astra was headed for an October release, but that plan has been canceled, according to the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ’s report comes at least in part from an interview with OpenAI’s Head of Safety Systems, Saachi Jain. The model, which reportedly showed improvement in the fight against model laziness nonetheless (in the words of the WSJ) “regressed in two areas.” Those areas were deception and the failure to seek authorization. Crucially

Anthropic will make its stock market debut as soon as November in an IPO that could catapult the AI startup to a record-obliterating valuation of more than $2 trillion. In a prospectus read and first reported Monday by Reuters, the company warned that the technology it’s racing to build could pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity.” In grandiose language that’s become typical of Silicon Valley during the AI boom, Anthropic reportedly said in

Donald Trump has developed perhaps the most effective way to get the general public to appreciate the work of public servants by launching a shitty chatbot meant to replace them. On Tuesday, the president signed an executive order to launch America.gov, an online portal that was built for “streamlining access to government services.” It’s not a terrible idea…in theory. America.gov is designed to basically work with the same chatbot-style interface that has